‘47 Meters Down’ (2017) ***/*****
Why do people keep thinking it’s safe to go back in the water?
Here’s the situation with 47 Meters Down, the new thriller from The Other Side of the Door director Johannes Roberts. It’s about a pair of sisters who have taken a vacation to Mexico in order to cut loose a little bit and get away from their problems, and the new problems they find theirselves facing when they fail to heed the warnings that every Mexican beach resort gives you to not book independent tours or activities that don’t go through their people. The girls are specifically older sister Lisa (Mandy Moore) and younger sister Kate (Claire Holt), and their new set of problems are specifically that a couple of locals have charmed them into going on their friend’s janky boat, to get into an even jankier shark cage, in order to swim with great whites. This is a horror movie, so things don’t go well. The winch holding the cage breaks, the girls sink all the way to the ocean floor, and the freshly chummed waters have put the monstrous and toothy sharks into a feeding frenzy that makes it pretty impossible for anyone to do anything about it. What will kill the girls first, the deadly sharks, the limited amount of air in their tanks, or the effects of the pressure of deep waters? Any way you look at it, it’s pretty clear that they’re screwed.
This is a very simple story of survival, which allows the script to stick to a very simple structure. There’s effectiveness in that simplicity. Two girls are stuck in a deadly situation, and they intend to get out of it. You know what their goal is, you know what the hurdles are in between them and that goal, and therefore it’s very easy to get emotionally invested in their struggle. The place where the storytellers can have fun is in those obstacles. Each time the protagonists solve one problem, their efforts tend to cause an even bigger problem, and great pain is taken to milk the maximum amount of stress and tension out of each little survival vignette, which not only keeps the audience at the edge of their seat throughout the whole movie, but also has the effect of making it feel like the film is always building up to something bigger. Clear end goals, escalating action — this sort of basic structure stuff is very simple and easy to do, but not enough storytellers pay attention to it these days, and whenever somebody does, it always makes their movies feel a cut above everything else around them. Especially in the horror genre.
47 Meters Down sells itself as a shark attack movie, but that’s just one aspect of the horror it brings to the table. What was much more effective for me was the way it also exploits just how deeply dark, vastly immense, and panic-inducingly overbearing the ocean is. To be trapped somewhere in it, without much idea of how far you are from the bottom, how far you are from the surface, or which direction you need to swim in to get back to where you need to go — the utter helplessness of that is terrifying. Factor in that any number of immense and deadly creatures could be circling you without you even knowing it, and you have a very powerful fear cocktail that can be very effectively mined for horror. Thanks to some strong underwater cinematography and a thumping, dread-filled score that owes more than a little bit to the music from Jaws, 47 Meters Down is pretty effective at mining that horror and turning it into good times at the cinema.
Moore is playing the less composed character here — the one who panics at their shadow in everyday life so they absolutely lose it whenever something legitimately dangerous actually does happen. That can be an effective character to put in a horror movie, because their reactions work to underline all of the scares and to hammer home to the audience just how dire things are, but man does she take things too far. Every second of this movie is full of her whimpering, whining, moaning and shrieking, to the point where she gets on your nerves and you start to want the sharks to just get it over with and bite her head off already. Holt is much better as the little sister who goads her elder sibling into getting into the shady sort of situations that she’s painfully uncomfortable with. Too often these instigator sort of characters can be loud, obnoxious blowhards, or completely oblivious morons who stumble into obvious danger only to get what’s clearly coming to them. That isn’t the case here. She’s fun and she’s reckless, but she doesn’t come off as being stupid, and when things need to get serious, she matches the tone of the situation. If there’s one big asset that this movie has that makes it effective horror, it’s that you like Holt’s character, so you actually get invested in what happens to her.
Where this movie stumbles is character arcs and dialogue. Structurally, the script is very good, but when it comes to the smaller details of crafting engaging and natural-sounding dialogue and fleshing out the two protagonists into being something more than a couple of anonymous damsels in distress, it doesn’t do so well. The dialogue is clunky and obvious. This is pretty apparent when the two girls stop everything they’re doing while trapped in a shark cage at the bottom of the ocean — with their air tanks running out — in order to have a melodramatic talk about their stupid relationship histories, but it’s never more apparent than it is every time Matthew Modine’s boat captain character opens his mouth. Everything he says is exposition. It sounds like he was recording soundbite snippets of dialogue to be inserted into a video game or something. Granted, the heavy lifting he does verbally makes sure that you fully understand how much danger the girls are in, and why some things they might do to get out of the danger could work and some absolutely won’t, but what a thankless job. He’s given absolutely nothing to do but make sure the audience knows what the Bends is, and how to use scuba equipment. He does look hilariously sun-bleached though, which is very appropriate for his ex-pat living in Mexico character, so there’s that to have fun with.
47 Meters Down gets the basics of storytelling right, which makes it effective horror, but it doesn’t quite nail the little details that can elevate an effective horror flick into being a good movie in general. One additional and extra-important thing it has going for it is that the sharks look really good though. The last big shark horror we got, The Shallows, also had good things to offer, but the big problem with it was that its shark was a dumb, fake-looking, CG piece of crap, which made it difficult to take the threat it posed seriously. It’s refreshing to see a smaller movie like this be able to bring a real-looking horror movie monster to life without breaking the bank. There used to be a much bigger middle ground between small independent pictures that can do whatever they want and big budget studio pictures that have to pander to mainstream audiences than there seems to be today. We need more of these mid-budget movies than can enjoy the freedom of taking a few risks while still being able to splurge financially here and there to make itself look legit. Creature features, if they’re made by talented people and they get a little bit of money to play around with, can be so much better than the SyFy channel schlock that they’ve been pigeonholed into being since dreck like Sharknado started going viral. 47 Meters Down isn’t doing anything revolutionary, but if it could be successful without having to stoop to intentionally “so bad it’s good” levels, it could start a revolution anyway.
